PREFACE 
NOTHING is more charming to the mind of man than the study of 
Nature. Religion, moderation and magnanimity have been made a 
part of his inner being through her teachings, and the soul has been 
rescued by her influence from obscurity. No longer doth man grovel 
in the dust, seeking, animal-like, the gratification of low and base 
desires, as was his wont, but on the wings of thought is enabled to soar 
to the very gates of Heaven and hold communion with God. 
Though made ‘‘a little lower than the angels,’’ yet, through the 
mighty play of forces that have been at work in the world, which we, 
in the latter half of this enlightened century, are just beginning to 
recognize and comprehend, he has been lifted from the mire of degra- 
dation and placed upon a higher social, intellectual, moral and spiritual 
level. Out of the animal, in the scheme of Deity, the spiritual system 
of things is to be elaborated, and not the animal out of the spiritual. 
This natural world, so to speak, is the raw material of the spiritual. 
Therefore, ere man can understand the spiritual, he must understand 
the natural. Though his knowledge was at first about material things, 
or such as pertained to natural phenomena, yet from this through the 
ages has been builded, little by little, that mountain-height of knowl- 
edge, intellectual and moral, which, if rightly directed, is to bring him 
into fellowship with Deity. ‘‘As we have borne the image of the earthy, 
we shall also bear the image of the heavenly,” or, Lord from heaven. 
When is considered, therefore, the immense good which the study 
and investigation of nature have accomplished, it is not at all surprising 
that the literature on the subject should be markedly in the ascendant. 
Natural science bids fair to be in a preéminent degree the pursuit of 
the coming man. There is no end to the books that have been written 
upon the subject during the past few decades, if not by specialists, but 
